Mr. Paul Sheridan:

I will take the broad picture. The industry does have capacity. We stand over that. The Cathaoirleach mentioned a couple of reports which the CIF has publicly pushed back on. We believe some of the modelling does not reflect the industry in its various segments. We are here to talk about the positivity around delivering the national development plan, which is necessary to support FDI and housing delivery. There are three distinct sectors: new homes, commercial buildings like pharmaceutical plants and data centres, and infrastructure - that is, water, energy and so forth. There absolutely is capacity. My colleagues will tell the committee of their personal experiences with their businesses, why they are exporting and the rationale for that.

The Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service has shown that from 2015 to 2021 the industry dropped the labour required on sites from 12 to 7.8 jobs per €1 million. That is a 33% increase in productivity. The Department of Finance did an analysis of a recent further skills and education programme, which all the ESRI figures come from. That report stated we needed 17,500 extra workers to build 33,000 houses by 2025. We only had to increase the numbers by 9,500 and we did it in 2023. The modelling is not correct.

We see retrofitting and the small domestic sector as an important area. It is very difficult to scale up that area. In that regard, we have to treat each segment with its own constraints. Right now, the constraints undermining these guys from building in Ireland are related to what we said in our statement: the bottlenecks in planning, the lack of consents and the cross-cutting policies that force agencies to restrict the process. My colleagues have more personal examples.